Across 10 counties in Washington, Latinos are one-third of the population, but they only hold about 4% of local elected offices. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

In the apple- and grape-laden Yakima valley in southern Washington state, Latinos drawn here by fruit-picking jobs have become the fastest growing sector of the population over the last decade. Politically, however, the Hispanic families who make up the majority of this archipelago of 10 towns stretching 40 miles southeast from county seat in Yakima have virtually no voice.

Two neighboring counties are now majority Latino and both the city and County of Yakima are nearing 50% Latino – up from 33% in the 2000 census. Yakima County ranks first in the US in the number of all fruit trees that are handpicked yearly by farm laborers – and almost all the field hands are Latinos.

But despite their surging numbers, the anemic political representation for Latinos has stubbornly remained unchanged. "The [Latino] population doesn't have the representation that it needs to speak to its concerns and issues," said state representative Luis Moscoso.

Moscoso is one of just three Latino Washington state legislators among 147 and in November he might be the only one. "There are only three Latinos in the state legislature and two of them are retiring this year," Moscoso said. "Unless we elect one or two of the other ones who are running, I will be the only Latino in the whole state legislature."

In this lush valley, where some towns have as much as an 80% Latino population, representation is even sparser with only a handful of Latinos being elected to local town government offices and school boards. In the county seat of Yakima, where about half the 100,000 population is Latino, there isn't one Latino among the seven-member city council.

Moscoso has been living in Washington for 37 years and has watched the Latino population boom. He says in that time there were fewer and fewer opportunities for Latinos to win an elected office.

"Particularly here in eastern Washington, it's difficult because we do have two counties that are majority Latino and three more that are nearly majority Latino," Moscoso said. "And yet they are not represented in government or civic affairs."

Currently across 10 counties in central and eastern Washington, Latinos are one-third of the population, but they only hold about 4% of local elected offices, according to research conducted by Whitman College's research program State of the State for Washington Latinos. In those 10 counties, 99% of the election systems are based on an at-large system, which requires candidates to run for office citywide and obtain 50% or more of all votes cast to win an election. Only 1% of those counties exist as single-member districts, where candidates simply have to win a majority of votes to succeed. Out of 1,891 office seats within those counties, only 78 Latinos hold an elected position.

Latino leaders say a systematic form of voter discrimination has marginalized their communities. At-large systems are widely regarded to favour majority ethnic groups because 50% of voters can chose 100% of those elected.

According to the National League of Cities, at-large elections weaken the representation of particular ethnic or racial groups, especially if the group does not have a citywide presence or are concentrated in a specific ward.

Frustration about the way that the at-large system strips Latinos of their political power was an important factor behind the recent riots in Anaheim in southern California following police shootings. Like Yakima, the town is 54% Latino but with no representation on the council.

"At-large elections unfortunately allow voting blocks with slim majorities to dominate local elections," said attorney David Perez, former assistant director of the Fred T Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at the Seattle university law school.

"What we've found is for the last few generations the population in Yakima has changed dramatically," Perez said. "But politics has not changed with the population."

"The main thing that was glaringly apparent in my research as far back as in 2005 was just how unequally represented the Latino population is," said Whitman College Political Science professor Paul Apostolidis.

"It seemed as though very few people were voting and there was very low political representation from what you can see."

Researchers say that the nearly politically invisible status of the Latino community is a result not only of the at-large system but also of apathy and what Paul Apostolidis, political science professor at Whitman college, calls "extremely racially polarized voting" – that is white voters refusing to give their electoral support in any significant numbers to Latino candidates.

Numerous attempts have been made to level the state playing field. All have failed. Filing a federal voting rights act case is prohibitively expensive and takes a lot of time to move through the federal courts.

Tony Sandoval, a Yakima businessman, filed a lawsuit in an attempt to change the city's council election system in 2011 but the suit eventually died in court. Also last year, a referendum to do away with at-large districts in Yakima was defeated by 58% of the conservative-leaning electorate.

Through both state houses are Democratic-controlled, the issue remains hotly contested with an unsure outcome. Republican legislators are gearing up to defeat the measure and hope they can peel off enough Democrats to block it.

'An entirely new generation of voters is emerging'

Toby Guevin, an official with OneAmerica, a non-profit immigrant advocacy organization that is supporting the voting act, says that Latino under-representation has negative effects beyond electoral outcomes. It breeds discouragement and apathy, polluting the entire political system.

"When the people you are voting for are never elected because of the election systems that are in place, when people who don't live in your community are representing you, when people who look like you aren't able to get elected at the local level, that has a really disempowering feeling."

Some defenders of the status quo insist that Latino representation is low only because so many of the Latino field laborers are undocumented immigrants who do not have the right to vote.

Not true, counters Perez. "The vast majority of these new citizens are here legally," he says. "The kicker is that the median age as of 2009 for this population was 17. This means that an entirely new generation of voters is emerging in eastern and central Washington, particularly in Yakima County."

And almost all of them are US-born citizens.

Democrat Pablo Gonzalez provides hope for change in the Yakima Valley. A 21-year-old American Latino now in his final year at Central Washington university studying political science, he is running for election as district representative. To boost his chances of winning, he plans to register at least 5,000 new voters before the November election. Many of them are likely to come from the high number of youth now able to vote.

Rosa Hanson, a farm owner in Zillah of Peruvian descent who harvests mountains of Fuji apples and plump red cherries each year, has been a long time supporter of Gonzalez. In fact, Gonzalez used to pick fruit on Hanson's farm as a child.

"Despite the high number of Latino people here, we aren't represented," Hanson said. "Pablo is a good kid, and he wants to do something good for his life, and he can be the one to do better for us and represent us. Young people are the new generation and our hope for a better future here."

Pueblo factbox

(All demographic data comes from the 2010 US census. Voting information comes from state and local elections officials.)

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